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A Moment of Silents: Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist

By Michael Sicinski

This “serious” breakthrough by French comic director Michel Hazanavicius, best known for his OSS spy-flick parodies, is a head-scratcher, a problem that won’t go away, and above all an object that isn’t worth the ire of any hardcore cinephile. It’s basic mediocrity in a clever new disguise. One can take umbrage, I suppose, at Hazanavicius bringing the most basic gestures of silent-era filmmaking into the mix. But we might just as well exercise our vitriol over, say, The Descendants, in terms of Alexander Payne’s lack of concern for DNR patients or Hawaiian culture. We’re watching a hollow premise in action, with the possible proviso that The Artist, like so much late-late-postmodernist, decadent-era trash, flatters its viewership for a thimble’s worth of Wikipedia learning. To call The Artist an homage to the films of the silent era is to imply that Hazanavicius or his muse, actor Jean Dujardin, regard them as more than a manageable plot device. They don’t—it’s apparent in the overall shoddiness of the production itself—but this doesn’t make the film any sort of travesty, or even prevent it from being nominally diverting. What it isn’t, however, is magical. It’s a kind of random-access image succotash, a wet clothesline of half-remembered iconic moments from a college course somebody told somebody else about having taken.

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